Firstly KDE is a pure non-profit: a non profit legally and in spirit. This means money is not a motivator, i.e. we do not use money as a carrot for contributors. In fact, there are no carrots in KDE, as there are no sticks. Nobody is given anything in exchange for their work and nobody is punished for not working either.
Contributors do the stuff they want to do and do it because they want to do it. Hence your proposition “do X in exchange of money” does no make sense in the context of KDE.
Money is viewed as just another resource that contributes to the survival of the project.
Secondly, you are coming at it from a consumer vs. provider perspective. In most contexts in our consumerist society, there is a clear divide between those who use the software and the consumers of that software. In a pure grassroots FLOSS community, like KDE, there is no clear border between the two.
If you want something done, you will be invited to join in the collaborative work of creating it. Even if you cannot code, your skill set will probably come in handy elsewhere in the community, freeing up resources or favouring the conditions that may help to create that thing that you want.
But then maybe not. The fact is, unless you are willing to lay down the foundations of what you want, there is a very slim chance it will actually happen.
I do understand where you are coming from: we all have our perspectives warped by the consumerist mindset of modern society. But KDE is not a business, has no business plan (because it is not a business) and does not use money as a business would.
TL;DR: if you want shit done, come and get it started yourself (or join in an existing effort). Donating will not give you the right to order unpaid volunteers around and make them do your bidding.
@kde@kde I often donated yearly when they're doing donation rounds, but I figured I could go that extra mile by becoming an actual member c:
I use this stuff daily and I'm also subscribed to other project patreons and such, so I think it makes sense. Good luck!
Yes. We need money to pay for personnel salaries, our yearly
Akademy event, travel for community members to sprints and other events, the maintenance and rent of our tech infrastructure, rent for our Office, taxes and insurance, and other stuff.
KDE's software is always evolving and being worked on. We need money to keep things moving, otherwise the KDE project and most of the software projects that rely on it would die.
Good question, and one of the harder ones to answer: Exactly, exactly it is "desktop environment". That is, a graphical environment and a series of graphical utilities that allow you to manage most aspects of your computer, and provides the infrastructure needed by your apps to run.
Plasma allows you to configure how your desktop looks, manage connections to the network, provides graphical connections to your devices (mice, hard disks, printers, etc.), let's you run your programs with ease, and also lets different programs to graphically communicate with each other (via, for example, drag and drop).
Edit: wait what they MAKE Krita? You’ve gotta be kidding me. They just make it work on Linux, right?
Oh no. A lot of our apps are multi-platform and work on Windows, macOS and Android apart from Linux. We do all the work of converting them so they run everywhere… It can be a lot of work!
If you like Krita, check out Kdenlive. It will blow you mind.
Also check out apps.kde.org. There are a lot of cool things there too.
This list is incredible. But like I’ve had Krita on windows for ages, I had no clue it was KDE! I just looked at the page for Kdenlive and wow I see why it’s at the top of the list. Unbelievably deep software!
So we still give away all the software for free, but maintaining and developing new versions (and new apps and features) requires quite a lot of resources. One of those resources is money. We rely on donations to get that.
@kde@kde
As a long time KDE user I've done sporadic annual donations as I remembered but this time I signed up as a quarterly member so I don't have to try and remember anymore. Love the DE, keep up the great work!